I reviewed The Shack about a year and a half ago, and posted my interview with Paul Young shortly after that. The book has just now dropped from the top spot on the bestseller list, and has sold 7½ million copies. After being rejected by 22 publishers. Yes, well, what did they know? Anyway, George Strombolalphabetsoup recently had William Paul Young on The Hour for a bit of an interview. Too bad George’s guests all get turfed after 10-15 minutes of fluff — the boy could be a great interviewer if they’d let him show his chops. Good discussion nonetheless, with some great lines. What is God like? “It took me fifty years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.” Read more…

Yesterday afternoon, the Autumnal Equinox occurred, summer ended, and fall began in the northern hemisphere where I reside. I noticed this today when Google‘s logo changed to a fall theme for the day. The fall colours have begun to emerge… wait, can I still use that word? The emergent leaves are beginning to turn… uh… I’m enjoying the fall colours. And in an apparently unrelated turn of events, the new issue of Next-Wave is out, with a cover story titled Emerge-ed?, which may possibly sound familiar, as I wrote and published it here a few weeks ago. The post takes a kind of summary view of the discussion around the abandonment of the term “emerging” or “emergent” with perhaps even an insight or two of my own in there. The post received some linkage and clearly resonated with a number of people… which I think might be fully attributable to the way it rides the coattails of a cult classic for which I’ve unwittingly awakened some kind of craving. Read more…

When I first began my series Then Sings My Soul: The Hymns of My Youth a year ago, I had no idea that it would run this long. I thought it would probably run several weeks, a few months — six, maybe nine — and I’d run out of material. I had no idea until I began looking back into old hymnals that we had sung so many hymns that remain familiar to me even today… even though I’m not often in a hymn-singing context anymore. Read more…

VB: I’m already in trouble, some people don’t even want to read my book because I say one bad thing about George Bush.

GS: [What did you say?]

VB: Well–that I don’t agree with my father. He’s a Republican and he raised me to be a Democrat, and so I’ve got the Republicans pissed off at me now, and it’s like, wait, whoa, dude, slow down– Read more…

On Friday I caught the tail end of an interview with Anne Harrington on CBC’s The Current. Harrington is the author of The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine. I’m sure I wouldn’t be down with all the ideas in her book, but a salient bit at the end was the discussion of “the placebo effect“. Harrington asserts that the telling of your story is part of the placebo effect — as is the visit to the doctor itself, before he’s even done anything for you. It works, she says, simply because we believe in western medicine. In response to the interviewer’s next question, she suggested that yes, the placebo effect would work even without the doctor. Read more…